All posts tagged bird

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone! I hope that you spend it with your loved ones, fur babies included!

There isn’t much to say about my genealogy efforts, although I did find a number of family member on Facebook so that is great! Now I need to pick their brain for all the missing information….

I finished my drawing of the Mustang logo and it turned out rather nice if I can say so myself. Never drew anything metal-like so it was a nice change -and challenge- and something I can use for my dog portraits if they wear a collar.

Now for my next project I might be a little too ambitious but I’m going to give it a valiant try. It’s the head of a bald eagle and I would like to draw it very realistic; after all, that is what I am practicing for and practice makes perfect, right?

Set up the sketch and worked some on the eye yesterday evening. Instead of using a ball stylus to indent (something I am used to use for (white) dog hairs) I am going old school and do the real negative drawing to make the feathers stand out.

This is the sketch. Not much to look at right now but I do hope I’ll have the eye done by next week; maybe more of the feathers that go around the eye and work my way around from there.

Hope everyone is staying warm with this cold winter. Time for Spring to spring!!

I should have posted last week, but I have been busy getting ready for a local Arts & Crafts show that we had last Saturday. Thor has been put on the back burner because I still had some gourd birds I needed to finish and had to put some flower arrangements together. Why I don’t know since this was the worst show I’ve ever been to. All day long we had people walking into our booth, telling us how great everything looks but we didn’t sell one single thing… Last year wasn’t that great either and with this year’s experience it shows that this is just not the venue for our art.

Here are some of the (small) birds I took with me. I have to take more pictures, also of the flowers.

The day was long, got up at 5am to pack everything onto the truck, extremely hot and we packed up before the show was over because there was a thunderstorm coming. It did give me time to work more on Chester, a Springer Spaniel I am drawing for a good friend of mine in the UK. I promised to draw Chester for her after he passed away last year but I’ve been too busy with other things. I reckon that big black cap was putting me off too! But, I am getting there now, started to give the basic black to the cap, still have to start on the gown and of course it needs a LOT of details still. Thought to show you though…

Today the weather was so wonderful here that I decided to take my gourd birds outside to do the engraving of the feathers with my Dremel.

The dogs sure loved it, especially Kender. I spent almost 5 hours outside and got only one bird done and in the meantime throwing the tennisball for Kender. I could tell that she finally got tired after 4 hours because she was getting slower in retrieving the ball LOL That is one dog who will sleep soundly tonight! As a matter of fact, she is sleeping behind my chair as I type 🙂

I guess the reason that it took me so long for this one bird is that the gourd has an outside that looks ‘old’ in some places. Calling it ‘old’ for lack of a better word. What I mean is that the shell is hard like wood, but it shows little crackles if that makes sense? Now, using the Dremel in those spots makes the outside chip and that is something I don’t want when engraving a line within the feathers…and about 80% of this gourd is like that. At least now I know not to use this type of outside for other birds

But, I got that finished and drilled the holes for the eyes and the legs; all I have to do now is chop off it’s head LOL, get the seeds out, make the holes for the eyes a bit bigger and glue them in from the inside with epoxy, carve a beak out of wood and also use epoxy to glue that in. After all that has dried (will be fast) I can cover the head with clay in the form of feathers where I made the opening.

I have it in my head that I want the beak to look like a duck’s so I need some thicker branches to whittle or I can use 2 wooden spoons and sand those down to the right size.

Then I’ll make some legs but not sure if I’ll use clay-covered wire or copper. If I use the wire I have to paint the legs too, if copper than all I have to do is disguise the drilled leg holes with clay feathers and paint those and the feathers on the head when they’re dry. The way I have it in my head I will go with the wire, so I can make some sturdy legs with “flipper” feet.

Almost 1 bird down and then 5 more to go…. Finishing those 6 gourd birds before my big “Thor adventure” is taking a bit longer than I expected LOL